1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates to the field of emergency mass notification systems, more particularly, to predicting the potential reach of an alert to its targeted recipients and devices within an emergency mass notification system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Organizations face many threats which may affect their operation and safety and security of their facilities and personnel. There is a growth of use of Emergency Mass Notification Systems (EMNS) by many organizations and on different levels, e.g., from national, state, local to corporate and organization levels. Emergency Mass Notification Systems allow authorized personnel and external systems to trigger alerts that are sent to targeted recipients via a variety of personal communication devices, including electronic mail (email), short messaging system (SMS), voice phone alerts, desktop pop-ups and others. Emergency Mass Notification Systems may also use non-personal notification devices, such as indoor speakers, outdoor speakers, reader boards, digital displays, Land Mobile Radios (LMRs), AM/FM Radios, TV broadcast, strobes, fire alarms and others. Emergency Mass Notification Systems allow one to maintain a repository of users, along with personal attributes (i.e. location, role, organizational unit, training level etc.) and the contact details of their personal communication devices, and to build a dynamic targeted recipient list for use while sending a specific emergency notification.
Targeted recipient list can be built by any combination of the following: pre-defined distribution lists, dynamic lists, geographical/physical location, organizational units, dynamic database query or other methods; or by selecting a pre-defined scenario (i.e., “policy”) that includes pre-selection of such targeted recipient list that may or may not be modified before activating the alert. Emergency Mass Notification Systems usually include a list of non-personal notification devices to be targeted and activated, including sirens, speakers, digital displays, strobes, fire alarms and others. Similarly, targeted non-personal notification devices may include any combination of pre-defined distribution lists, dynamic lists, geographical/physical location, dynamic database query or other methods; or by selecting a pre-defined scenario that includes pre-selection of such targeted non-personal notification devices that may or may not be modified before activating the alert.
One challenge faced by conventional Emergency Mass Notification Systems is that regardless of the method used to select the targeted recipient list, an alert initiator (administrator or external system) has little or no idea during alert activation what is the potential reach of the alert across a targeted audience or targeted devices. For example, some Emergency Mass Notification Systems show the number of targeted recipients or a list of targeted recipients or devices, but no indication whether that these targeted recipients and/or devices can be reached at all because contact details for the recipients may be missing or invalid, or may not be up-to-date. Some conventional Emergency Mass Notification Systems provide detailed delivery and response tracking and aggregated results reporting, yet this information is provided after the notification has been activated, and does not provide any pre-activation indication of the potential reach of the notification.
This difficulty leads to ineffective alerting, where an alert sender cannot know what the potential reach of the alert is, and may lose time during an emergency situation trying to alert recipients or non-personal notification devices with missing contact details, invalid or stale contact details, disconnected non-personal notification devices or invalid non-personal notification devices data. Thus, there is lacking, inter alia, a system and method for predicting the potential reach of an alert to its targeted recipients and devices via a given set of designated delivery methods within an emergency mass notification system.